The Influence of The Pop Ballad

The Influence of the Popular Ballad on Wordsworth and Coleridge Author(s): Charles Wharton Stork Reviewed work(s): Source:
PMLA, Vol. 29, No. 3 (1914), pp. 299-326 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/456924 . Accessed: 10/12/2012 04:42
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XIV.-THE INFLUENCE OF THE POPULAR BALLAD ON WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE AlthoughbothWordsworth and Coleridge were strongly influencedby the popular ballad, they were attractedby this formfor very different reasons and affected by it in very different ways. The one point in common is that this influence was in both cases mainly for good. Wordsworthwas drawn to the ballad by its directnessand simplicity of style, and by the fact that it often treats of the lower classes of men in what Rousseau would have called a natural state of society. Coleridge took up the ballad for a nearly opposite reason; i. e., because of its remotenessfrommodern life, a remoteness that left him free play for his imagination. Thus, oddly, Wordsworth cultivated the ballad be,caiuse it had once been close to common life; Coleridge because it was now remotefrom commonlife and gave him a formremarkablysusoeptible of that strangeness which the romanticgenius habitually adds to beauty. Wordsworthpreferredthe domestic,or occasionally the sentimental-romantic, ballad; Coleridge markedlyadhered to the supernaturalballad. As the subject is rathercomplex for a brief surv,ey, the following arrangementwill be adopted: to examine in each author separately the influenceof the ballad, first generallyand in relationto his theoryof poetry;, secondly, in detail as to the subject, treatment,and form of the poetryitself. At the outset we encounterWordsworth'sprefaces to the Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge's attemptsto explain them in his ]3iographia Literaria. Wordsworth'stheory of poetry has been such a mooted question that we are 299
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of it unless we his-statement certainto overemphasize of the Prefaces. In a note what he himselfthought 1 on the manuscript of BarronField's Memoirs side-note the poet Wordsworth of the Life and Poetryof Williamr asserts: " I nevercared a strawaboutthe 'theory,'and Coleridge, of MIr. at therequest the'preface' was written was never "I out of sheergood nature." And again: too,2claimsthe Preprose." Coleridge, fondof writing face as " half a childof myownbrain." We maypause unfairof the philosopher-critic to notethatit was rather groundand to tempthis colleagueinto disadvantageous thenfall upon him. it the Reliques had upon Wordsworth What influence influan suLch felt he that maynotbe easy to determine; " enceis proved passage:3 I do notthink bythefollowing day in verseof the present that thereis an able writer to his obligations to acknowledge be not proud would who ' and, thatit is so withmyfriends; the Reliques'; I know I am happyon thisoccasionto makea public formyself, avowalof my own." of ballad narWe may safelvassertthatthe influence of poetry conception upon Wordsworth's rativetreatment few was very slightand very indirect. He wrotebuLt he called a goodmanypoems he wrote realballads,though disclearlyand repeatedly of poetry ballads. His theory forwhicha trueballad can exist, avowsthe onlypurpose for its own story tellingof a dramatic the effective niz., sake.
The moving accident is not my trade; To freeze the blood I have no ready arts:
p. 386. Letterseditedby ErnestHartleyColeridge, Coleridge's to thePreface,1815. Prose Worksof Wil'Essay-SRupplemenftary Vol. II, p. 247. ed. Knight, liam Wordsworth,
2
1 Lettersof the Wordsworth Vol. III, p. 121. Family,ed. Knight,
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'Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.4
Again, speaking of the White Doe, he writes: "I did not thinkthe poem could ever be popular just (qy. first?) because therewas nothingin it to excite curiosity, and next because the main catastrophewas not a material but an intellectual one." All the action proceeding from the will of the chief agents is " fine-spun and unobtrusive"; Emily " is intended to be loved for what she endures." Let the dramatist" crowd his scene with gross and visible action "; but let the narrative poet " see if there are no victoriesin the world of spirit," let him bring out the interestin " the gentlermovements and milder appearances of societyand social intercourse, or the still moremild and gentle solicitations of irrational and inanimate nature." Wordsworth decries6 the qualities of writing which " startle the world into attentionby their audacity and extravagance" or by " a selection and arrangementof incidents by which the mind is kept upon the stretchof curiosity, and the fancy amused without the trouble of thought." Other passages could be added, but the foregoingwill suffice to show why WVordsworth's ballads as ballads are unsatisfying. His entire theory (which, at least in this case, underlayhis practice) was opposed to the methodof the popular ballad. The ballad depends upon action, Wordsworthupon description and relection; the ballad is objective and impersonal,Wordsworth maintainsT that the poet should treat of thingsnot " as theyare," but " as they seem, to exist to the senses, and to the passions."
6 Letters, III, pp. 466, 467.
' Hart-Leap Well, opening stanza of Part Second.
6Prose Works, II, p. 253. T Idem, II, p. 226.
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Consequentlythe ballad proceeds, as Professor Gummere says,8 by a " leaping and lingering" method,holding the attentionby rapid movement, suspense, and adequate cli9 in " gross and max; whereas Wordsworth disbelieves " and says 10 that in his poems " the violent stimulants feeling therein developed gives importanceto the action and situation,and not the action and situationto the feelings." The ballad is unconscious, existing in and for itself; but in Wordsworth's opinion 11 poetryshould have a purpose and should be the productof a mind which has thought long and deeply. In general we may say that no otherof the great English poets was by temperament so incapable of writing a good ballad as Wordsworth. All that he got from the subject matterof the ballad was the idea of attachinghis descriptions and reflectionsto a story, or, as it often proved, to an incident. What, then, were these " obliga tions" to the ballad which the poet was so careful to acknowledge ? The truthseems to be that Wordsworth's genius (which, as Coleridge says, was one of the mostmarked in English poetry) was scarcely at all imitative. The ballad first suggested to the philosopher that he should convey hi8 teachingby means of narrative. Afterwardsit suggested something else far moreimportant;namely,that he should adopt a simple style,close to the usage of commonpeople in real life. In any case, when Wordsworthwrote,objectively,he would have writtenof the peasants who lived around him, but Percy's Reliques caused him to write in a more direct and intimate way than Crabbe had done. Yet thoughthe style of We are Seven is simple, it is not
8The Popular Ballad, .p. 91. 9Prose Works, i, p. 52.
10 Idem, I, p. 51.
" Prose Works, I, pp. 49, 50.
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with a ballad simplicity,but in a manner akin to Blake, whose every phrase must be pondered,even dreamt over, before we realize its full significance. As we read the Lyrical Ballads we get not so much the incident that is related, as the personalityof the poet; we see things not as they are, but as they seemed to Wordsworth. It was fortunate that such a profoundpoet shouLld have early formeda styleso lucid, but in otherways the choice of models was not advantageous. Wordsworthevidently 12 he was writing as primitivemen had written, thought and justifiedhis deviation fromthe prevalentfashion by declaring13 that " poems are extant,writtenupon humble subjects,and in a morenaked and simple stylethan I have aimed at, which have continuedto give pleasure fromgeneration to generation." The foregoing obviouslyrefersto ballads. Wordsworth wrote of humble people as he thoughtthey mighthave writtenof themselves, he strove to be a voice to those
men endowed with highest gifts, The vision and the faculty divine, Yet wanting the accomplishmentof verse.14
Whetheror not he succeeded in this, he gave English literature some of its noblest poetryin the attempt,though his most successfulnarrativeformwas not the stanza but blank verse or octosyllabiccouLplets. The reason why the narrative style of the Lyrical Ballads seems to us oftenso flat,even now that we know its elementsof greatness,is easy to explain. The old ballads which the critics, from Sir Philip Sidney to Professor Child, have taught us to admire are elementallytragic
Prose Works, i, p. 77. "3Idem, i, p. 66. "4The Exccursion'.Book i, iL. 78-80.
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and compelling; the ballads Wordsworthpreferredwere tame and dilute Eighteenth-Century versions. He cultivated the spirit not of "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence," but of The Babes in the Wood;15 and we may suppose he enjoyed less the stirringtales of Percy and Douglas, than 16 the " true simplicityand genuine pathos" of Sir Cauline,principally (as he knew) the product of the " Augustan" Thomas Percy. WithouLt denying a certainmeritto Wordsworth's we need not favorites, be surprised to find insipidities in the poems which they inspired. These faults are prominentfromthe fact that a simple style more than any other demands an unuisual inspirationin its matterto raise it above the commonplace, and Wordsworthcould never see when his subject fell from the significant to the trivial. The " gross and vio" of the old ballad narrativegave vitality lent stimulants to many a weak phrase and line; with the modernpoet the initerest of each passage started from a dead level and, being helped by no poetic conventionof any sort,depended solelyon the intrinsicpowerof thegivenpoeticimpulse. Few writers have dared to depend upon pure poetry (re-inforced, however,by deep moral purpose) so entirely as did Wordsworth, who discarded storyinterestand all the adventitioushelps of imagery associated with poetic stimuli. The resultwas that he earned all he won. It is of course true, as Coleridge says,'7 that in the Lyrical Ballads there is a certain " inconstancyof style"' (we should call it a lack of integrity in tone) which intrudes because the poet will not choose suitable subjects, or, having chosen,18 will not raise the weaker portionsto the level
U Prose Works, I, p. 71.
1TBiographia
Literaria, chap. xxII. Hs Idem, chap. xiv.
1Prose Works, Ti, p. 243.
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of thebestby theuse of poeticalconventions of any sort. But in the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth has established thehabitof absolute which has madehis greatest sincerity passagesand poemsa modelof whatBagehotjustlycalls " in poetry. How large a sharethe bal"the pure style lad had in forming thishabitevery reader mustjudge for himself. The influence of Milton,while it tendedto ofstyle, obviate baldness was at thesametimea re-inforcement to Wordsworth's native sincerity. Perhaps even Pope, withwhomhe rather unexpectedly asserts thathe is familiar,'9 mayhavehelpedWordsworth to clarity and memorable lines. But theballad influence is alwaysto be reckoned with,particularly in someof the greatest later poems. Having considered the generalinfluence of the ballad on Wordsworth's of poetry, poetryand theory we shall niow takeup thespecific detailsof his practice. Thereare threedistinct typesof influence to be noted: first, imitationsof the Eighteenth-Century domestic ballad, usually built aroundtrifling incidents of the poet's own experience; secondly, ballads proper,impersonal poems with genuinestory interest usuallytakenfrom tradition;and poemsfoundedon old ballad ideas but givena thirdly, totally newsignificance. In the first class the subjectsare all modern and realistic. We thinkat onceof Lucy Gray,Peter Bell, Ruth, The Idiot Boy,etc.,etc. This is theclasswhich illustrates Wordsworth's remark thatthesituations wereonlyused to bringout the characters. Poetry of this class is very uneven, becausethe simplified styleleaves each theme to standor fall on its merits. In PeterBell a greatdeal of incidentis used ratherunconvincingly to accountfor a
"ILetters, II, p. 122.
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ofheartin thehero. In Buth thestory change out brings the chastened beauty of a soul ennobledby suffering. Thesetwomaystandas types ofthepoet'sfailure and success; as to theothers, let every readerform his ownopinion, remembering, however, thata trivialsubjectmaybe developed intoa farfrom trivialpoem. A difficulty thatbesets us hereis to distinguish between theballad and the lyricin a givencase. Whereshallwe class The ReverieofPoor Susan,or The Childless Father, or The Fountain? As all thepoemsare in a senselyrical, i. e., thevehicle ofpersonal and nonestrictly a balfeeling, lad, we shallgiveup anyformal to classify attempt them. In the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth sometimes uses subin place,buthe introduces jectsremote are onlytwowhich set in the traditional past. Of these Ilart-Leap Well beginswitha truenarrative swing, but shirks the climax (" I willnotstopto tellhowfarhe fled Nor will I mention by what deathhe died"), runs into description and reflection, and ends witha moral. Ellen Irwin belongs to thesecond classofballad influence. Despitethepraisegivento theLyricalBallads,Wordsworth everreturned totheir hardly method.He mayhave feltthattheblankverseof The Brothers and Michaelwas atless dangerous and moredignified medium for the lessonshe wished to impart by meansofthelife around him. At all events, his nextattempts in the ballad are ballads proper, setin thepastandin story objective, sufficient unto themselves.To thisclass belong Ellen Irwin,The Seven The Horm Sisters, of Egremont Castle,and The Force of Prayer. All of thesesulbjects are medieval and all are on stockballad themes; that is why they are so easy to classify. The pointhereto be notedis that, though all of theseare respectable poems,neverdescending to bathos, theyhave contributed and will contribute verylittleto
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does with theirauthor'sreputation. When Wordsworth a ballad whata ballad shoulddo, he achieves onlymediowith crity. Better are his earlier nondescript efforts, faultsand theircharacteristic virtues. theirglaring of all, uniting The third class is themost as interesting of the old ballad withsomeof the it does the attraction in all of Wordsw'orth. To thiswe mayperfinest poetry haps relegate twopoemsfrom the Tour in Scotland, Rob Roy's Graveand The SolitaryReaper. The heroof the former appearsin a dramatic which monologue anticipatcs ofBrowning; themanner it breathes humor and a healthy ofliberty. In The Solitary fine open-air spirit Reaperwe have a picture as immortal as anyby Millet. So, Wordsworth believed, thetwoprincipal themes oftheballadwere " and the handeddown;the" old,unhappy, far-off things " familiar matter ofto-day." It was thelatter typewhich the poet had cultivated first;he was later to reflect the " spiritof battleslong ago." If thereare any twopoemsof Wordsworth morestrikinglynoble than the rest,are theynot the Song at the Feast of Brougharr Castle and The WhiteDoe of Rylstone? If we answeryes,the reasonwill be becausein thesetwo poemsonlyis Wordsworth's of life philosophy intoreliefby contrast withits opposite. In Lord brought we have opposedglorious Clifford actionand humble but soul-sufficing patience,and it is because the impulseto actionis so splendidly in thelines connoted
Armor rusting in his halls On the blood of Cliffordcalls
offorbearance is so memorable. thatthevictory In the WhiteDoe the case is similar,although the are less dramatically contrasted.This poememmotives of Wordsworth's bodies perhapsthe deepestexpressions
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beliefin therefining ofsuffering, whenit power especially is enduredamid " nature'sold felicities." 20 The mystic symbolism of thedoe is a new effect, slightly anticipated, perhaps, by suchlyricsas The Cuckooand by the fish in Brougham Castle. It was evidently Wordsworth's hope2' thatthestory, taken from theballad The Risingin bodily the North,mightserveto present his convictions more clearlyand forcibly thantheycould otherwise be stated, and althoughHazlitt22 thoughtthe narrativepart a " drag,"themajority ofcritics havesustained theauthor's choice. The narrative is veryspirited in itselfand,as in the case of Brougham Castle,the virtues of actionbring out most clearly the highervirtuesof endurance. It wouldbe out of place to praisefurther; we may onlyremarkthatin The WhiteDoe Wordsworth makeshis best use, bothin styleand in substance, of thepopularballad. in treating As we noted theLyricalBallads,an accurate classification of ballad influence upon Wordsworth is but at least a few randomcases of the first impossible;, and third herebe mentioned. types should After theLyrical Ballads there are onlytwoimportant stanzaic narrative poems dealingwith the present, viz., Fidelity and The HighlandBoy; a factshowing how far the poethad recededfrom his earlierpractice. Bothof thesepoemscontain beautiesfar morenoteworthy than any in the objective medievalballads. A little-known piece, which is, remarkable from ourpointofview,is George however, and Sarah Green, perhapsthe onlypoemcomposed as a balladistwouldhave composed it. These lineswerenotthe
20
21 Letters, I, p. 343.
From the sonnet, The Trosachs.
22Letters, ix, p. 62. Coleridge also says in generalising, " Wordsworth should never have abandoned the contemplative position " (Table Talk, July 21, 1832).
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result of " emotionrecollectedin tranquillity"; for Wordsworth tellsus 23 he " effused them"under thedirect emotion causedby the event. Theygive thatimpression to the reader; the reflections attached are scarcely more complicated thanthose of a villager might havebeen,and the wholehas the ballad qualityof beingmoreaffecting thanthesumof its parts-as if thepoethad composed too fastto put in all he felt. Similar, butmoreextended and less poignant, is Wordsworth's last narrative effort, The, Westmoreland Girl. For thethirdclassof influence, old ballad motives with we may perhapsclaim the Yarrow moderntreatment, sense of ancientwrongand series,with theirhaunting in thebackground ofthescene. On theother sorrow hand, Wordsworth's earlyand veryinteresting play The Borderers, disappoints the promise of its titleby givingus no hintof traditional matter save a passingallusionto the fairies. The classicLaodamia is out of our province;so are themedieval The Egyptian romances, Maid and Artegal and Elidure, bothin the mannerof Spenser. The fainttracesnoticeable in blank-verse poemssuch as,The Brothers mayalso be passedby. class Nearlyall theballadsof thefirst (contemporary) to the second) are (Part One of Hart-LeapTWell belongs thirdpertold either by thepoetor by someunnecessary in to thepopularusage of neverbringing son,as opposed " I." Again,Wordsworth's thepronoun interest primary in character insteadof ballad givesus individual figures types,people who merelydo things. In his objective medieval balladshe has less chanceforintimate analysis, a principal reasonwhythesepoemsare nugatory.In the moresubjective poemsof our thirdclass we have forthe
'-Letters,m, p. 465.
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firsttime character contrast,that feature essential to all dramatic effects. Lord Cliffordin Brougham Castle has two natures, the active spirit of the ballad hero and the passive fortitude developedin him by
The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
In The White Doe Emily and Francis. are represented minutely,the othersalmost with ballad brevity,but with the more effect in contrastfor that very reason. Wordsworth began with the regularfour-line stanza,but soon branched out into variants; e. g., an eight-line stave riminga b a b c d c d, in which the " a's" have always a double ending. Then there are many original combinations of couplets and alternaterimes, such as those in the ten-linestanza of Her Eyes are Wild and the eleven-line stanza of The Thorn. It would be out of proportion here to enumerateothers; suffice it to say that theyare all built upon the two original ballad norms of the rimed couplet and the four-linestanza with alternate rimes. The poet seems to have been experimenting to find a slightlymore complex arrangementthat would make his lines appear somewhatless bare, in fact he tells us 24 that he thinksthe stanza used in GoodyBlake an improvement on the stereotyped method. In Ellen Irwin he imitates Burger's Lenore. The footis nearly always the iambus,notable exless Father, in anapests. In lyric flexibilityThe White Doe is reminiscent, not always happily,of Christabel. The three most marked qualities of popular ballad style25-the refrain,repetitionof conventionallines and
Cf. Professor G. L. Kittredge's Introduction to the Cambridge edition of English and Scottish Popular Ballads and his referencesto Professor Gummere's works.
25
ceptions beingThe ReverieofPoor Susan and The Child-
24Prose Works, I, p. 69.
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phrases, and "cincremental "-are conspicurepetition ously rare, diminishing froma moderate importance in We Are Seventonegligibility in almost all poems after the Ballads. We haverefrains Lyriical in The Thornand The Seven Sisters,thatof the latter,"the solitudeof Bennorie,"suggesting ofcourse theballadof The Two Sisters. The Idiot Boy aboundsin repeated phrases, but as a rule Wordsworth followed themodern method of thinking out and finding synonyms original adjectives. Of incremental repetition used for dramatic suspenseand climax,as in Babylon, Edward,and manymoreof thebestpopularballads,there is notoneexample. Thereis no conscious alliterationin Wordsworth. His forced use of inversion, borrowed from theimitation ballads,decreases steadily. As to thelanguageof theLyricalBallads notbeingthe 20 is of course of real life,Coleridge language right. In a broadsenseWordsworth never wrote of anybody buthimself; he givesus 27 not people as theyare but peopleas theyappearto him. We cannot, therefore, expecthimto makethemtalk as theyreallywouldtalk. His creations have a verystrong and definite actuality, but it is largely an actuality lentthem by their creator. As a penetrating critichas said in another connection, fact plus imaginationgivesanother fact-the finalfactbeing, as Coleridge notes,28 much more interesting and universalthan the original. Had Wordsworth written as he proposed, his poemswould have been a littlebetterand a greatdeal worse. It was in imitation of the Eighteenth-Century ballad style, whichWordsworth supposed was an adapta26 Biog. Lit., chaps.xvn, xx. '7Cf.p. 301,supra,and note. Wordsworth expressly says that some of his figures werecomposites (Dowden,Studiesin Literature, p. 145 and note). 's Biog. Lit, chap. xvii.
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ofreal life,thatLucy Graywas madeto tionofthespeech " That,father, will I gladlydo," surely answer, a cardinal of thenamby-pamby; specimen it was from thepoet'sown heartthatthelinescameNo mate, no comradeLucy knew; She dwelton a wide moor, -The sweetestthingthat ever grew Beside a humandoor.
so muchlike This lastis whatwe maycall theBlake note, theballad-and so muchmoreunlike! Of course thetwo the outthe blendin different proportions, personal driving imitative as timegoeson. But if the styleof theballad had done no morethanhelp Wordsworth to findthe lanan infinite guageof common it wouldhaverendered sense, in thosedaysof theDella Cruscans service and other conof Eighteenth-Century tinuators The extent artificiality. of thisinfluence, as already stated, can never be calculated in the case of a poet who so entirely assimilated and so strongly modified all thataffected himfrom outside. on Coleridge The questionof ballad influence is combut none paratively simple, extremely interesting theless; for although but one poem of importance inis directly volved,that happens to be The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The Three Graves, the fragment of The Dark La,dieand Alice du Clos are theonlyother ballads,though of the tradition suggestions appear elsewhere. And not onlyis thefieldof ballad influence in Coleridge verylimited,butthecharacter of thatinfluence is almost uniform. As notedat thebeginning of this article, it consists of a medieval glamour and remoteness almostinvariably tending towardthe supernatural. Wordsworth had at first made use of theballad process somewhat as he conceived a peasantmighthave done; its closeness to common life
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and itsdirectness ofstyle had impressed him; he mayhave liked to think he was keeping the convention alive. on the otherhand,was in his bestpoetry Coleridge, pria stylist, or perhaps we should marily rather say an artist. As withDe Quinceyand Poe (bothofwhom, likehimself, were a preyto stimulants) his soul was enamoured of a beautyexquisitely and terrible, a beautynot of strange timeor place, but dwelling in the utmost of the regions imagination. Now to the generation of Coleridge(and largelyto thosefollowing)the strangeand the terrible seemed to belong of right to theMiddleAges. De Quincey' s Avenger and Poe's Fall of theHouse of Ushershow howthesekindred geniuses sought a kindred atmosphere. It was almost inevitable thatColeridge should haveanticipated them,and thathe shouldhave used the ballad, as Chatterton did, only becausein manyways it connoted themedieval. Coleridge's theory and practice of poetry wereinstincthoseof art forart'ssake. Despitehis admiration tively for Wordsworth's stronger and sounder genius,even de29 spitehis preference ofhis friend's poetry to his own,he couldnothave written other thanhe did. Consequently, polemical critics mustrangethemselves underthebanner ofArnold or of Swinburne in thedispute as to thepriority of thetwopoets. Withthisdispute we haveherenothing to do. It is, however, important to noticeColeridge's em30that" poetry phasison style. He maintains justifies as poetry new combinations of language, and commands the omission of manyothers allowablein othercompositions. Wordsworth has notsufficiently admitted theformer in his systemand has in his practice too frequently sinned
29 Traill's
Life of Coleridge (English Men of Letters Series), p. 41. ' Letters, pp. 374-5.
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thelatter." Again,3'" Everyphrase, against metaevery phor, every personification should have its justifying " of thepoetor his characters.He clausein somepassion finds Wordsworth'sPreface 32 " very grand, . . . but in partsobscure andharsh in style." Coleridge was evidently man a who justified literature, especiallypoetry, pretty largelyby its style. We need not,then,be surprised to findthattheballad forhimwas not a method of treating actuallifeas it appearedto him,butrather an assortment of poetic devices by which to give the effects he was planning. But theballad did far moreforColeridge thanfurnish himwitha fewpigments bywhichto obtain whatwe may call delocalized local color, a coloring whichmakesreal to us thecountry of his imagination.It is notby a coincidencethathis greatest finished poem,the one poemuniknownand universally versally praised,happensto be a ballad. Coleridge'sweaknesses were lack of substance, lack of purpose, and lack of virility. The popularballad existsonlybyright of substance, becausethecomposer has a story to tell; its purpose is clear and inevitable, to tell the storyand be done withit; and its form-in stanza, line,and phrase-is terseand vigorous.Here,then, is the ' The Ancient reasonwhy,as Mr. Traill has observed,33 Marineraboundsin qualitiesin whichColeridge's poetry is commonly deficient";why here alone we have "'an 34 vividness extraordinary of imagery and tersevigorof " 35 descriptive phrase "; whywe find brevity and self-re" here and not in any otherpoem by the same straint author. It was surely theballad convention thatkeptthe
31Idem, p. 374. '2Idem,p. 387.
ss
"
Life of Coleridge, p. 47.
5 Idem, p. 53.
Idemn, p. 51.
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poem going,and it was possiblythe ballad tenacityof purpose that caused it to be finished; the incompleteDark Ladie throwssome doubton the latterpoint. As to the causes of Coleridge's failure with his other poems,muchhas been said thatneed not here be rehearsed. He himself asserted36 that the alleged obscurityof his poetry came from the uncommonnature of his thought, not fromany defectin expression. He said 37 that poetry nearly always consistsof thoughtand feelingblended,and that with him philosophical opinions came in to such an extent as to form a peculiar style that was sometimesa a virtue. But on this point Coleridge, fault and sometimes the subtle specialist in criticism,contradictshimself; for in anotherplace 38 he declares that AMilton's of definition poetryas " simple,sensuous,and passionate " sums up. the whole matter. The second statement is of course the sounder view. Doubtless Coleridge hoped to write of abstruse subjects in a style that would not be abstruse,but it was impossibleto get any simple,sensuous,'orpassionate results out of such an involved mode of thoughtas his. One has only to look at his prose, with its continual discriminations,qualifications,and parentheses,to see what so often hindered him frombeing a poet. On the other hand, Wordsworth's philosophicalideas, thoughdeep, were simple; and his convictionas to their truthwas so strong as to become a passion, as witnessparticularlythe Ode on
Intimations ofImmortality.
Why was it, we may ask, that in The Ancient Mariner Coleridge forgothis involutionsand assumed the virtues he so seldom had ?-h'ow could he for this once adopt the methodsof the ballad? The answer is to be found in a
"Letters, pp. 194-5. 3TIdcm,p. 197.
8
Idem, p. 387.
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certain mysticismwhich the modern man feels in the finestpassages of the old ballads, a mysticismfar simpler than that of Coleridge, but sufficiently permeating to appeal stronglyto his sympathies. This effectis hardly to be described, hardly even to be illustrated-one critic will find it where another will deny that it exists-but every true lover of the ballad will have felt it again and again in favoritepassages. Perhaps as safe a selectionas any is the stanza of Sir Patrick Spence which Coleridge himselfprefixed to his Dejection:
Late, late yestreenI saw the new Moon, With the old Moon in her arms; And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! We shall have a deadly storm.'m
Anyone who has tried to teach the ballad knows how difficult it is to bringthe latentbeauty of such passages before an average mind; but once the beauty is perceived,it has a strangely pervasiveand enduringpower. This Coleridge felt as no otherman has ever felt it. Launching into the story with typical ballad abruptness,he yielded himself to the narrativecurrentand was borneby it safelythrough the labyrinthinereefs of metaphysics indicated by his own notes in the margin. Though The Ancient Mariner is true Coleridge, it is in this case a Coleridge that has given up his own intricateand nebulous mysticism for the more direct and concretemysticismof the ballad. C'omingto the considerationof Coleridge's ballads in detail, we findthe firstof these to be The Three Graves. The first two parts of this poem seem 40 certainlyto antedate The Ancient Mariner. In the firstplace the poet
" The correct form of this line is: " That we will come to harm." Coleridge must have mixed stanzas 7 and 8 of Percy's version. I Quoted in Mr. J. D. Campbell's notes, Globe ed., p. 590.
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asserts41 that the storywas taken from facts, in the second the style very stronglysuggests Wordsworth,especially in its imitationof faults which Coleridge later condemns. As in Wordsworth, the tale is put into the mouth of an unnecessarythird person, and such a prosaic indirectnessas the followingindicates a most inartisticresemblance to its models:
She started up-the servant maid Did see her when she rose; And she has oft declared to me The blood within her froze.
But the storyitself was one that would have been abhorrentto Wordsworth;the idea of a mother'sguiltylove for the affianced husband of her daughterwould have repelled him at once. Coleridge professes 42 to have chosen the " subject not from any partiality to tragic, much less to monstrous events,"but for its imaginativeand psychological interest. This defense, by the way, is exactly that which a moderndecadentmightuse on a similar occasion. The treatment, too, is distinctlyimmoral, or, as some critics now preferto call it, unmoral. That an innocent pair should suffer fromthe curse of the guilty motheris, at least to an average person, repugnant. Coleridge's penchanttoward the supernaturalappears in his dwelling on this point and even going so far as to imagine that
the mother's soul to Hell By howling fiendswas borne,-
an unsatisfactory bit of poetic justice, as her curse lives afterher. But thereis power in the poem,a power of just the sort that anticipates the success of later pieces. Throughoutthe stanzas we feel the uncanny genius of the
41
Ibid., p. 590.
4'
Ibid., p. 590, 589.
318
CmARIuES WnARTON
STORK
poetstruggling in a trammeling head element, often rising and shoulders above it. The Three Gravesis far from beinga goodpoem,but fragmentary and inchoate though it is, we can hardlyunderstand The AncientMariner without it. of our subject. After This brings us to the center the of The Three GravesColeridgeselected experiment just the themethat suited him, and in the treatment kept tolerably clearofthehampering ofhis colleague. influence To be sure,Wordsworth suppliedthe idea 43 thatthesufof the Marinershouldbe represented fering as an atonement for the death of the albatross, and no doubtthe moral" He prayeth concluding best" was composed under his influence; but thesecan easilybe detached fromthe bodyof the poem. We are all familiarwiththe agreeIment44 in regard to theLyricalBallads by whichWordsworth was to bringout the supernatural side of natural scenesand Coleridgewas to bringout the natural,the humanly comprehensible, side of his supernatural phantasies. It was only in The Ancient Mariner that Coleridgedefinitely carriedout his share of the undertaking. was notwritten The Ancient Mariner, to illushowever, or even to carryout a conscious tratea theory purpose. sum up the effect of the poem Few phrasescould better who called than that of an inspired undergraduate " a literary Turner." Thereis in thesetwothe Coleridge brillianceof color,the same triumph same glorifying of overmeresubject, thesamemarvellous beauty giftof style wvhich arts almostto the emotional raisestheirrespective levelof music. Even thehumansoul livingthrough the
I Quotedin Mr. Campbell'snotes,Globe ed., p. 594. " Biog. Lit., beginning of chap.xiv.
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scenes of the poem, which Lamb thought the greatest achievement of all, is renderedin a light of unreality; for the Mariner's mostpassionate outcryawakens no real pain in us. Why, then,if they are so vague, do this poem and (say) Turner's Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus exercise such a powerfuland enduringinfluenceover us? In the case of Turner we know that it is largely fromthe firm command of draughtsmanship whi,h he allows us to see more clearly in his water-colors. In Coleridge a similar firmnesscomes from the groundworkof the ballad, the most marked and dominating of all the conventional formsin poetic narrative. The concisenessof the ballad and its insistent progression demand a relationof the parts to the whole not unlike that required by the laws of perspective. (This, like most analogies, may be carried too far, but in general it seems to be not inaccurate.) Taking his plot from a dream,45Coleridge began his long flight unhamperedby the weightof actuality; course and destinationindefinite, as it were. Though the Marirer tells the tale, the effect on the reader is almostthat of an impersonal narrative. The speaker tells nothing of WTho he is and little of what he does, he is as a helpless soul passing throughstrange experiences. Consequently we feel the events of the poem very immediately; we do not watch the hero as we watch Lord Cliffordor Emily Norton, we live his adventure with our inmost being. It would seem fromthis that The White Doe is nearer to the old ballad than is The Ancient Mariner, but in reality we feel that the Nortons are always illustratinga philosophical idea, whereas the Mariner neither reasons nor causes us to reason. The explanationsof his voyage are as mysticallysimple as are those about death in The Wife of
'4 Quoted in Mr. Campbell's notes, Globe ed., p. 594.
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CHEARLES WHARTON STORK
Usher's Well or about fairyland in Thomas Rymer; the modern poet exercises hardly more arbitrarycontrolthan does the nameless bard. In both cases we feel intensely but abstractly. We notice that Coleridge is oftentempted to digress,but the ballad inspiration drives him on, just as it drove the author of Sir Patrick Spence. The storyexistsfor its own sake as a workof art; essentially it conveys, or should convey, no moral. Its one weakness in form is its promise of a moral suggested,as we have seen, by Wordsworth. For the shootingof the albatross is an absurdly small offense to bring about such a punishment,and the attemptto make the other sailors responsible by having them approve the deed is even worse; besides, the accomplices are punished with death, whereas the principal expiates his sin. Fortunately we feel these defectsbut slightly, for we must relinquish our judicial qualities to followthe magical flowof the lines. We have been somewhatover-accenting the resemblance of The AncientMariner to the ballad; the differences must not be forgotten. As a poet of the highest imaginative power and the most exquisite technic, Coleridge raises every stanza, every phrase, to a miracle of design. The very absence of apparent effort in the process is the final proofof his perfectart. What we findin a happy stanza here and there among the old ballads is a regular rule with the modern poet. His similes are nearly always brief and his metaphorsdirect,but the best of ballads is dull and uninspired in comparison. His greater subtlety and sensitivenessmake the old forms seem rough and childish; his controlof sound and color is like a sixth sense. And yet the balance is not all on one side. If the ballad has no real description,Coleridge has no real narration. What we have called a storyis but a succession of descriptionsphotographedon the receptivesoul of the
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Mariner. No one does anything, least of all the hero. Tried in the heat of normalhnmaninterest (the testof meltsaway to nothing, its appeal the ballad), the story can be onlyto the few. To the peasantfor whomThe was written, HuntingoftheCheviot thewholewouldhave the " tale of a cockand a bull" thattheearlyreseerned found it. The imagery and verbal musicof Colerviewers to thecompact idge are opposed statement and strong beat of the ballad not wholly to the advantage of the former. is a difference Afterall, there between real and acquired simplicity. Ballad of theDark Ladie is closely The unfinished conwiththe morelyricalpoem,Love. The latter nected46 tellsus, was intended to be an introducpiece, Coleridge tionto theBallad. But the incidental toldin Love story notthat is apparently -ofThe Dark Ladie. In Love the knight wearson his shielda burning brand,whereas the Dark Ladie sends her page to find "the Knight that wears/ The Griffin forhis crest." We have littleclue as to whatthe tale of the Ballad is to be, but this little seemsto indicateanother motive thanthatused in Love. WhenLord Falkland speaksto his lady of stealing away to his castle "Beneath the twinkling stars" and she shrinks from the idea of darkness and wishesto be married at noon,we have a foreboding of the Lenoretheme, the dead loverreturned to claim a livingbride. There is a feel of the G-erman ballad of terror aboutthe poem noticeablein the rathergushingsentiment and in the effort to arouse a shudder. Fartherthan this the evidencewill not take us. In Alice du Clos, however, we have a distinctly Germanballad with several passages reminiscent of Scott. The theme is violent and painful,
I
Quotedin Mr. Campbell's notesto the Globeed., p. 612-3.
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thenarrative stylelabored, thediction overwrought. The is sadlystrained fragile strength of Coleridge in handling suchmaterial;crudeacts,thestapleof theballad,belong to a worldoutside his knowledge. Nevertheless thepoem has beautiful descriptive lines and one stirring passagein Scott'sbetter style:
Scowlnot at me; command myskill To lureyourhawkback,if you will, But not a woman's heart.
Alice du Clos is at least a better excursion intotheterritory oftherough and readyschool ofpoetry thanis Scott's ballad of Glenfinlas intothe realmof the fantastic. in the poems Passing on to consider ballad influence whichare notballads,we beginnaturally withChristabel. If everstyle without substance couldmakea perfect poem, in of it wouldbe the case thisunrivalled piece of filigree work. To Swinburne it seemedthe acme of poeticart; but few even of the truestart-lovers can be satisfied by without and colorwithout melody sequence, shape. The poem,if one mustdefine it, is a sortof lyricromancecaprice, in which the lights are always changinglike thoseof moonlight on a waterfall. But thereare ballad in the mistyatmosphere elements of Christabel. Terse and directphrasingoftenlends the same vividnessto effects supernatural that we have notedin The Ancient Marinerand Sir PatrickSpence. For instance,
And Christabel saw that lady's eye, And nothing else saw she thereby. QuothChristabel, So let it be! And as the lady bade, did she. Her gentlelimbsdid she undress, And lay down in her loveliness.
But thesteady flow of theballad narrative and thesteady pulse of the ballad stanza are not thereto give purpose
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and consistency to thewhole. Perhapsit was becausehe had no traditional modelto sustainhim that Coleridge 47 he had "scarce poeticalenthusiasm confessed enough to finish Christabel." This at least we know: the story in Christabel in longdescriptions, forgets itself losesitself in digressions, changes repeatedly, and neverends. Kubla Khan in smallcorresponds to Christabel in large, of mystery thatin it theelement except is oriental instead of medieval;a factwhichreminds us thatat thisperiod " in tales of the oriental novelwas rivalingthe " Gothic terror. The only pointof interest forus in the shorter poem is the "woman wailing for her demonlover," a figure moreindigenous to the medievalballad48 than to the Arabiantale. Dejectionin theline " The grandold ballad of Sir PatrickSpence" givesus the onlyspecific mention of a ballad or of the ballad whichhas thusfar appearedin Coleridge's published writings. His quotaSir Patrickat thebeginning tionfrom of sucha personal poemshowshow sensitive he was to the uncanny feel of ballad lines evenwhentheymnerely displayeda popular beliefas to theweather. The Knight'sTomb also has a ballad touch. Love has been sufficiently treatedin connection withThe Dark Ladie. The WaterBallad is too feeble to deserve thesecond partof its title. The Devil's Walk is an excellent humorous ballad. It remains onlyto examinethe detailsof ballad influenceon Coleridge. The ThreeGravesis in form an imitationof Wordsworth's early stylewithbut a suggestion of independence.In Parts One and Two the four-line stanzais unvaried, in Parts Threeand Four occurseveral of the fiveand six-line stanzascommon in The Ancient
"7Letters,p. 317. Cf. the ballad James Harris or The Demon Lover, Cambridge ed. of Ballads.
'8
324
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is modern, no medievalism Mariner. As thestory can be brought in. form of thetitle, whichwas The Rime of The original the AncyentMarinere,shows at once what effect the to create, but laterColeridge author intended covered his versionof the text two repetitions tracks. In the first "' were and the words" phere,"" n'old" and " aventure to diminish the appearanceof borrowexcised,probably " was alsochanged, ingfrom theballad; theword" swound but later restored. The spellingwas modernised as in " " not the title; the cases were numerous, cauld," Emer" beingexamples.49Colerauld," " chuse" and " neres idge's tastewas well-nigh perfect in this point,for the of the poem conveys the idea of remoteness vocabulary and neverof affectation. In contrast, the unfortunate phrase" bootless bene" in The Force of Prayeris almost in Wordsworth. theonlyarchaism Ballad repetition, similarly, thoughmuch more freis used withgreatdiscriminaquentthanin Wordsworth, tion. The echoing of a single wordgivesa greater physical reality to theidea in
The ice was here, the ice was there The ice was all around;
as in " Alone,alone,all, all alone" and " Water,water everywhere."Phrasesare repeated and parallelism prewiththe same effect, served i. e., the reader'sattention is kepton the sensuous objectand not diverted to the style by any unnecessary change of the wording. The phenomenaof sunriseand sunsetare made particularly intimateby thismeansand bytheaddedtouchof personifica49 One of Professor Archibald MacMechan's students has discovered that all Coleridge's borrowingscame from the firstvolume of Percy.
INFLUENCE OF THE ROPULAR BiALL
325
progression
tion. Incremental repetition is not carriedbeyondthe

He holds him with his glittering eye.
followed at the opening of the nextstanzaby

iIe holds him with his glittering eye.
in Coleridge. Alliteration, Thereis no refrain anywhere ruggedin the ballad, is toneddownso as not to jar the delicateverbalmusic of the whole. " The furrow fol" subtly relieves lowedfree theinsistence of the " f "s by r "s and " 1." There is strong the play of C" vowelallit50in "Alone, alone,all, all alone,"but thechange eration " is so faint of shading and thefactthatthe" glottal catch a soundserveagain to showhowperfect is thepoet'sear. whichis oftenso awkward in Wordsworth, is Inversion, handledwith the same care that appears in the other detailsof The Ancient Mariner. That Coleridge was working toward a morepurely lyrical metrewe see by his variantsof the regularballad stanza. Internalrimeis frequent. The five-line stanza a b c c b is used sixteen times,so thatthefollowing form is nearlytypical:
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked We could nor laugh nor wail; Through utter drought all dumb we stood! I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, And cried, A sail, a sail!
the six-line also cultivated Coleridge stanza (occasionally foundin the old ballad), oftenrepeating with a slight in lines 5 and 6 the thought variation of lines 3 and 4, as in
? Cf. the paper read by Professor F. N. Scott before The Modern Language Association, Dec. 30th,1913.
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CHARLES
WHARTON STORK
A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware; Sure my kind saint took pity on me And 1 blest them unaware.
and This device is used by Poe in The Raven, Ulaluume, Annabel Lee. One passage, lines 203-211, is veryirregular, suggesting the movement of Christabel. Two similes, lines 446-451 and 433-438, are so extended as to divert the eye to the secondarypicture, and the descriptionof the hermit at the opening of Part Seven is an absolute toward digression. All these points show the tende-ncy lyric freedom and diffuseness which were to prevail in Christabel and Kubla Khan. It seems not worthwhile to examine the details of ballad influence on other poems more minutely than has already been done. The Dark Ladie is veryregular,Alice du Clos very irregular. In The Three Graves we have a failure in the unmodified ballad, in Christabelwe have a failure, at least from the point of view of narrative, in the lyrical romance; The Ancient Mariner stands betweenthem,combiningthe meritsof traditionwith the meritsof the poet's individual genius. It is hardly a coincidence,we may repeat, that Coleridge's most famous poem is that in which he made the mostwell-considered use of the popular ballad.5'
CHARLES WHARTON STORK.
5'In other chapters of a proposed book on ballad influence upon English poetry since 1765 the author hopes to show that the ballad has had in general a salutary effectin modifyingthe extreme individualism of the Romantic Poets.

The Influence of The Pop Ballad

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The Influence of the Popular Ballad on Wordsworth and Coleridge Author(s): Charles Wharton Stork Reviewed work(s): Source:

1 Lettersof the Wordsworth Vol. III, p. 121. Family,ed. Knight,

' Hart-Leap Well, opening stanza of Part Second.

6Prose Works, II, p. 253. T Idem, II, p. 226.

" Prose Works, I, pp. 49, 50.

Literaria, chap. xxII. Hs Idem, chap. xiv.

1Prose Works, Ti, p. 243.

From the sonnet, The Trosachs.

ceptions beingThe ReverieofPoor Susan and The Child-

24Prose Works, I, p. 69.

Life of Coleridge, p. 47.

Ibid., p. 590, 589.

CHEARLES WHARTON STORK

Quotedin Mr. Campbell's notesto the Globeed., p. 612-3.

INFLUENCE OF THE ROPULAR BiALL

tion. Incremental repetition is not carriedbeyondthe

followed at the opening of the nextstanzaby

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